Welcome to Geography of Virginia (GGS 380) at George Mason University - Fall 2016

Springfield Dam was built in 1918 to create Lake Accotink as a water source for Camp A. A. Humphreys (now Fort Belvoir)

Before you graduate from George Mason University (GMU), get to know Virginia. When someone says

"What was it like where you went to college?"

you need a better answer than

"Oh, I dunno. Traffic was miserable. Weather was hot. Humidity was worse. Trees were green. I never really paid attention..."

While you are at GMU, discover the unique character of Virginia.

You see certain things in certain places: dark volcanic lava in Shenandoah National Park vs. orange/white river gravels on the trails of Prince William Forest Park. You'll see a threshing barn for wheat - but not a tobacco barn - at Mount Vernon.

On Sunday mornings, watch for horse-drawn buggies on the roads near Dayton in the Shenandoah Valley, and golf carts on the roads at Colonial Beach. There are coal trains, but no passenger trains yet, in Roanoke. Cotton is grown in southeastern Virginia, where roots can penetrate soils three feet deep. Apples are grown in the Shenandoah Valley and on hillsides of the Blue Ridge, where slopes are too steep and soils too thin for row crops.

Our climate has been warming for 18,000 years. Early English colonists thought they could grow oranges in Virginia; it is at the same latitude where oranges grow in Spain. However, if it gets warm enough to grow oranges in Virginia, there will be none at Jamestown. The 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in North America was commemorated in 2007, but if sea level rise continues that site (plus Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Glousester, Chincoteague, the Pentagon, and many other places) will be underwater before the 600th anniversary.

Be curious, ask questions, notice what is different in various places. If you visit another university in Virginia, notice that most of the original academic buildings for schools east of the Blue Ridge (such as William and Mary or the University of Virginia) are made from red brick. West of the Blue Ridge (at Virginia Tech or James Madison University), you'll see white limestone structures. That's not just by chance; the buildings reflect different bedrock geology.

Figure out why there are two separate-but-equal lakes at Twin Lakes State Park, and why the Third District was the first to elect an African-American member of the US House of Representatives in modern times. The population dynamics have been changing since the English arrived in 1607 and the first Africans in 1619 - but the first Erupeans who attempted to settle in Virginia spoke Spanish when they arrived in 1570. In 2014, one-third of the residents in Manassas told Census officials they were "Hispanic or Latino."1

Get savvy about geology and topography, so you know why the Shenandoah River committed "stream piracy" and why the water that flows past Virginia Tech goes to New Orleans instead of Virginia Beach. Get a clue about how the widening of the Panama Canal will increase the number of trains that slow down traffic in Ashland, Farmville, and Manassas.

Norfolk Southern trains (shown here at at Pembroke in Giles County) carry Appalachian coal to Pier 6 at Lambert's Point in Norfolk for export to steel mills

Why bother to learn geography? Former Governor Gerald Baliles tells a story of a business trip to a foreign country, where he arrived a day early. He toured the capital, enhancing his understanding of local culture and history before the courtesy call to meet the country's president. In their brief conversation, his local knowledge impressed the foreign leader, who then made some unexpected phone calls and made the business trip more successful.

You may not be leading trade missions or meeting presidents of foreign nations, but knowing about the places where you do business can improve your success as well. As Gov. Baliles put it:2

Regardless of your audience, you have to understand the importance of context... How does this particular thing fit into a larger scheme of things? If you understand context, and if you can prepare, you can persuade... You know, it doesn't hurt to do your homework.